Don't worry, the Microsoft hit squad will show up at your door and extract the 2p from you in some way.

Make that four. Despite being not as hip, Symbian still has the biggest market share among smartphone OSs. Nokia is also pushing its own flavour of Linux, Meego for its higher end phones.

I thought Symbian was going away? I know they were talking abotu Symbian^4 to compete with all the big boys (well, ios and android), but I thought they'd abandoned those plans.

*does some googling*

I guess it may be hearsay:

Symbian's dead, and MeeGo won't cure ailing Nokia
Not-so-smartphone vendor Nokia must swallow pride -- and medicine -- and embrace Android or even Windows Phone 7
http://www.infoworld.com/t/mobile-platf ... -nokia-659

There's a lot of press saying Symbian (^4 or ^whatever) is dead, but I throw that on the same heap as all the iOS is the future press. It's more hype than fact. Sure, Symbian market share is dropping, but it's still the most used smartphone OS, so it's too early to leave it out. And how many people thought Windows Mobile was dead when MS released the halfbaked 6.5? Now they've just released 7 and suddenly they are supposed to be completely back.
So in short, I decided to be safe and jumped on the Android bandwagon.

The old windows mobile was definitely a dying O/S, but Microsoft was touting windows mobile 7 (now windows phone 7 or whatever) long before it ever came out. Of course, you're right, everyone figured Microsoft lost the race in mobiles, and they appear to be doing quite well. Supposedly WebOS would either make or break Palm, but neither seems to really be the case. It sure didn't do all that well, but it's still around.

Nokia is just a monster. I think they're grasp of what makes a good phone O/S isn't all that great, but they move so many Ox-Phones that they can afford to blindly grope around for the answer. *shrug* We'll see... the more mobile operating systems out there, the better. Competition breeds innovation.

LOL@ Ox-phones.

Well since Palm was bought by HP some time ago, they do have backing by a big company with deep pockets, so I hope they'll bounce back. I believe WebOS was widely praised when it came out.

Yea, people liked Web-OS, but I think Palm was hoping that it would become bigger than it is now, with other manufacturers picking it up and paying licensing fees or whatever. That certainly didn't happen. Not saying it's a bad O/S, but it's not all that and a bag of chips, either. For that matter, Android has a bunch of serious deficiencies, but I think its open-source nature will help with that. iOS is a clusterfuck.

Everyone knows Ox phones are superior. They don't fall apart after a year or two and allow you to actually cal and send messages, which (with some sense of exaggeration) seems almost more like an option than a prime functionality on many phones these days.

just for the record, my Palm Treo lasted 2 years with no negatives that weren't phone 'features'. Like the tiny amount of RAM and local O/S storage where I'd have to manually delete all my texts every once in a while or I'd run out of 'hard drive' space for my O/S. Piece of carp. Oh sure, 30 MB for an O/S? No problem!

*mutters*

When you said it lasted 2 years, did you mean without it actually breaking down or without you changing phones?

Cause, you know, my former dinosaur size phone lasted me almost10 years before it gave in.

God I should start a luddites club or something. And then go Unabomber on a blackberry sales point.

heh... it lasted 2 years until I switched phones. I gave the phone to someone else.

Well my previous phone (Nokia 6500 Ox-like) started losing keys after a year, so they are not all good either. If they fall apart after two years I'm fine with it, because that's when I'll get a new phone with a new subscription anyway.